REX TILLERSON DID CORRECTLY CALL THE PRESIDENT AS HE SAW HIM

 WHY THE GOP IS SO RIDICULOUS TODAY!

     …Leonard Leo, a lawyer that is causing much of today’s problems with the GOP

 

How we got to where we are today, with the U.S. Supreme Court and other issues?

 

You have probably never herd of Leonard Leo, but this far right ideologue is a major leader in our crazy, right-wing world.

He is just one of a world of anti-democracy extremists who hold an iron grip on today’s Republican leadership.

Leo, as a lawyer, is a fanatic devotee of the fiction that our U.S. Constitution was intended, not as a founding document for democracy, but as a legal structure for enshrining property rights as being supreme over all other issues.  The U.S. Constitution that Leo feels was for protecting the wealthy from America’s democratic majority.

In fact, yes he’s totally nuts.  But he is also very cunning.  In only 20 years, this shadowy Washington operative rose from the pack to become a darling of Washington’s right-wing society and the kingpin of corporate and GOP efforts to impose their agenda on America.

Leonard Leo and his merry band of billionaires are not merely putting some arch-conservatives on the Supreme Court.  Their intent is nothing less than a structural dismantling of our democratic framework.  They want to create an un-American America by pushing judges who will hammer plutocratic government into the “law of the land”.

But America has actually been here before.  That was back from 1897 to 1937  This became a pre-FDR New Deal, 40 year period of limited constitutional government.

Liberty for the rich, white men and their corporations that is.  This was then referred to as the Lochner Era.  Named for a particular infamous 1905 anti-labor Supreme Court ruling.  It was a shameful period of massive greed by industrial and financial barons.  More shameful still, the baron’s self-entitled approach was ratified as legal and moral, by questionable judges who binged on court-sanctioned, plutocratic, Lochner “days-of-glory,” when the following occurred:

• Minimum wage standards, child labor laws, and collective bargaining were invalidated by corporate coddling of courts claiming that such protections interfered with private contract rights and privileges.

• At the time, the majority of America lived in poverty.  Judges struct down anti-poverty laws including an early version of Social Security.  The judges call these laws, government intrusions into the free market.

• Women then had no work rights and could be imprisoned for just using any birth control.

• Many courts routinely approved racially segregated, impoverished schools, for children of color and they rubber-stamped hundreds of blatant voter-intimidation approaches.

• Back then, Judges could coldly deny poor people the right to a lawyer, while authorizing police to beat confessions out of those arrested.

If you think such morally based policies are beyond the pale in this more enlightened era, look at the attacks coming at us all today.  This is what's going on:

Roe v. Wade overturned, rampant voter suppression, racial gerrymandering, the demonization of immigrants, many book-banning’s, the repression of labor organizing, “Don’t Say Gay” campaigns, cuts in Social Security, repeal of equal education requirements, the whitewashing of history, calls to revive child labor, sanctioning of monopolies, roll back of environmental and health protections, “fake election fraud” and Q-Anon  insanity, and don’t forget: Governors, Ron DeSantis (Florida) & Greg Abbott (Texas), plus a coming plague of more “Little Trumps”, and much, much worse.

All of this is the Brave New Lochner World that Leonard Leo is advancing. 

And he’s using the U.S. Supreme Court to lead the way.

Copyright G. Ater 2022